@ by Camille St Martin
Why does social media matter for child care centers? Your Facebook page is the face of your business, a complement to your website, where potential clients interact with you. Your posts support your brand, tell your story, engage your fans, and create touch points that build trust. Your Facebook page represents what you stand for and it s where you gather and communicate with your community. It s been shown in various studies that you need at least 7 points of contact with a customer before they do business with you. Social media is a great platform for creating multiple points of contact for potential families to get to know, like, and trust your child care business. I hear a lot of child care owners getting frustrated because they don t have a lot of likes on their Facebook pages. It s important to focus on engagement and not worry so much about how to get more likes on your page. Engagement creates relationships, gets your posts seen by a larger audience, and is a good investment of time. When you have engagement and are posting out useful, valuable content, your fan base will organically grow. Ultimately, Facebook is an effective marketing machine where you can send traffic to your website, collect leads, and turn leads into enrollments. How to do this is a whole long course by itself (which we will be releasing soon!) but it is important to understand basics in communicating with your audience on Facebook before making this leap. If you know how to communicate to your audience then you will get better results with your paid advertising. But coming up with daily content to post on you child care s social media can be overwhelming! And sometimes it might feel like we spend a lot of time figuring out what to post, only to feel like just a couple people are seeing it. If you re stumped, here is a complete guide on what to post that will help you get your story out in a bigger way and connect with families in your area.
PHOTOS TIPS & IDEAS: Always use clear, high quality eye-catching images. One good image is better than 10 blurry, not very exciting or engaging photos of the same subject. Content with photos and relevant images get 94% more views than content with text alone. Here are some tips to remember when considering photos: Tell a story about the photo. Talk about what the kids are doing or what they are learning. Say something about the photo! This more often than not gives you the opportunity to link back to your school. For example, the kids had so much fun today learning about seeds at the apple orchard. If your child would like to join, click here for more information about our school. Don t do this for every single post, but definitely take the opportunity at least once a week. Send your website traffic! Say something at the end like, Want to learn more about our programs? Click here. A link back to your website if relevant and whenever possible Tie what you say about the photo back to your school, philosophies, branding, benefits, etc. For example, if you have some pics of kids doing yoga it s a great opportunity for you to talk about the benefits of yoga for children, or even about the extracurriculars you offer. Or if it s a pic of kids eating their lunch, it can be an opportunity to talk about the free lunch you offer. Fun photo ideas: pic collages, close-ups of kids projects, classroom activities, events. Two great resources for collages and other photo editing is picmonkey and canva. Don t upload all 42 photos of the same activity at one time! Just pick the good ones that people will like and share. Upload one at a time. This usually gets much more engagement than uploading a whole album. If there are a lot of good ones, spread them out and post them over the course of a couple days. Get more mileage out of your photos!
VIDEOS TIPS & IDEAS: They can be entertaining, engaging, light-hearted, informative and personable. Videos are a fun way to connect with your followers and really show the true essence of your child care center! But who and what to film? It doesn t have to be completely professional, just take five minutes and use your phone to get some quick video. (And don t film vertically!) Activities going on in the classroom School updates: swipe something quick from your newsletter and put it in video format Have a teacher explain what is going on in their classroom that week You or a teacher giving a parenting or early childhood education tip. Answer a frequently asked question Have a new staff member say hello and introduce themselves. Give people a tour of your classrooms & outdoor space
Personality Posts Personality Posts Yes, your audience wants to know more about you! Don t be afraid to share your own photos or snippets from you own life. The most engaging posts on my client s pages are usually ones of owners with their families or engaging in something meaningful to them. Let your audience get to know you a little. This is a great opportunity and platform to create a level of trust that parents need to have with you! Seriously. Be meaningful, be genuine, be authentic. What to share? Here are some ideas: Photos of the owner with their families or in activities that are important or meaningful to them Real stories about the business - how did you start? What do you love about it? Quotes about your philosophies on early childhood education or just on life! Create a fun graphic in picmonkey or canva or find one online that illustrates how you feel. Parenting advice and child raising tips. What are some of your own experiences? What is going on in your life? If it is positive and relevant, don t be afraid to share! Is it your daughter s birthday? Let people know and post pics, they love to see that! Milestones and big news in the school. Are you thinking about a new sign? Post about it and get feedback!
Teachers & Staff Features The same above is true with your teacher and staff! Social media is a great opportunity to introduce families to your staff and teachers. Ways to say hello and get to know your staff: Interesting did-youknows? Quotes & videos from staff - why they love your school and why they love being teachers Quotes from teachers about their philosophies on education created or found online What s happening in the lives of your employees? Let your following know about big moments and milestones in the lives of your employees. Birthday, training completion, new baby? Celebrate! Pictures of staff with their families or doing fun relevant things outside of the school (with permission of the staff of course)
BLOG POSTS BLOG POSTS Are you blogging on your website? If not, it can be great for your marketing and a great online lead generation tool for your school. I have other resources to teach you how to set up a blog, and what to blog. If you are blogging, make sure that blog is getting out on social media! The biggest mistake people make with a blog post is posting the link to the blog on social media once and then never posting it again. If you have a blog, leverage it! Post about your blog posts multiple times (spaced out, of course) but use different wording. Brainstorm different titles, take a quote from it, or create a different image for it. You put all the work into posting the blog, now get the word out! Post a link to your blog multiple times (spread out, just switch up the description a little!) Pull a text quote from the blog Find different images to represent the blog when you post about it Create your own graphics about the blog
TESTIMONIALS & REVIEWS Testimonials and reviews provide great content! If you have video testimonials, post them on social media, repeatedly. Grab quotes from the testimonials and reviews and create a graphic to post. Canva.com is a great tool to help you easily create graphics. You can also take a screenshot of any online review and repost it to your company page and say something like, Thanks for the great review! Take screenshots of reviews around the web (FB, Google, GreatSchools. org). Repost the screenshots onto social media. Repost any video reviews onto social media. Create your own graphics of impactful quotes from the reviews or testimonials. Quote from video reviews: grab a quote from a video review and turn it into a text review or a graphic you can repost. Post pics of the family with the text of the review. I often do this with Facebook reviews. If someone leaves a review, I will comment and say, Thanks so much! Mind if repost your review on our FB wall and grab your profile pic to go along with it? Showing faces with the reviews lends it credibility.
BEHIND THE SCENES BEHIND THE SCENES Everyone loves a little sneak peek at the real moments behind the scenes! Take candid shots of yourself, your employees, or snap a shot of your office or workspace. Other moments to share: Staff events, activities, team-building, and training Snippets of meetings - what did you talk about? What is some news or things you are working on? Videos of all of the above
CROSS-PROMOTIONAL POSTS Cross-promotion gives you huge potential to reach new people & grow your audience. Consider partnering with complementary and non-competing businesses related in some way to your child care center and posting about what they have going on in exchange for them posting about you as well. Just find local businesses, see if they have a large social media following and send them a message on FB. Ways to team up with, and post about, local businesses on social media: Deals that the company might be offering (i.e. kids haircuts!) Then ask that company to post about any enrollment deals you may have going on. Talk about any events the company may have going on. Then send them a post about your school they can repost about on their event or page.
LOCAL AREA POSTS LOCAL AREA POSTS Connect with parents, families, and potential clients in your area by posting community happenings. Be a local source of information for your families and potential clients! Bookmark good sources for your local area that you can refer to when you want to do one of these posts. Also like local FB pages as your page. Then scroll through your pages news feed every once in a while to see if there is anything to repost. Some ideas: Any local news that families might be interested in Local child-friendly events Festivals, carnivals, book fairs, workshops, etc. Deals, sales, etc.
RELEVANT "OUTSIDE" ARTICLES OR LINKS Sometimes coming up with fresh, engaging content can be tricky and a bit time consuming. Supplementing your original content with articles related to child care and parenting is a great way to keep your audience engaged and be a source of information. Paying attention to what is trending on these sources will also give you ideas for your own content. Top sources for our industry: 1. https://app.buzzsumo.com 2. Twitter hashtags, for example #childcare 3. Feedly: parent hacks, the art of simple, enjoy the small things, modern parents messy kids, hands free mama, rage against the minivan 4. Pinterest Write a small blurb to go along with the article link, don t just repost without saying anything about it. Make a connection. Explain why you think the article is relevant and how it relates to your child care center, beliefs, benefits, mission, programs, family life and/or philosophies
REGULAR GIVEAWAYS Ask questions that relate to your school (and encourage reviews). Create a monthly contest around it. One of the best things about social media is that it allows you to interact with a wide audience of people and potential clients directly. Asking questions invites your followers to be engaged, so you can start up a dialogue and make your audience feel heard. Question ideas: What would you tell a friend about our school? What was your child s favorite activity this week? What do you love most about our school? Give something away to the best answer to the question (you choose the winner!) or just say there will be a random winner if you don t want to choose. ( special gift ideas- book, gift card, etc) Use a specific hashtag to promote your giveaway, for example #WinWednesday if hosting as a recurring weekly online event Try boosting your giveaway posts to increase reach and responses
THROWBACK THURSDAYS People love seeing old pics. Post out older pics from your school, from groups of students in years past, or of yourself from a time long gone! Make sure to hashtag #tbt #TBT TWO QUICK SOCIAL MEDIA POSTING TIPS: 1. If your post fails, try editing the wording and reposting. 2. Try different times of the day. If you don t see much action, delete and repost later in the day.
HOPE YOU ENJOYED THIS OUTLINE OF IDEAS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT FOR YOUR CHILD CARE! This is meant to be super quick information (a review for some of you and new stuff forothers) and a reference point that you can use at anytime for ideas. If anything doesn t make sense or is confusing in any way don t worry! I am releasing a social media course just for child care centers very soon with more great stuff to answer any questions and make it all so-verycrystal-clear. The course will also go over how to get actual enrollments for your child care center with social media ads AND how to recruit high quality employees with Facebook and Instagram. I ve figured it all out for you so you don t have to. The course launches at the end of the month. Stay tuned! @ by Camille St Martin
@